Many paid search advertisers simply don’t spend enough time writing relevant ad copy and testing ad copy to improve click-through and conversion rates. Although click-through rate is not everything when optimizing ad copy, it does impact quality score, which also impacts cost per click, cost per conversion, and return on your investment. Therefore, focusing on both click-through rate and conversion rate when optimizing ad copy is crucial.

Instead of following best practices like your competitors, why not take the time to implement a few changes? You can drastically improve you click-through and conversion rate with just a few easy to implement tweaks!

Google released “Creative That Clicks” that provides improvements they saw internally from implementing ad copy best practices (many of the statistics below were taken directly from this report). Although implementing tactics and their impact will vary case by case, these tactics are a really good place to start.

In addition to modifying the ad copy itself, utilizing ad extensions have been documented to have the biggest improvement on increasing click-through rate. Certified Knowledge released an awesome chart to show the potential lift from each ad extension along with best use cases and limitations/requirements. The image below illustrates the various ad extensions and the average improvement.

Average Improvement from implementing all ad extensions: 94.5% Improvement

Therefore, by implementing the ad copy best practices mentioned above and all ad extensions, an average of 119.9% improvement could be seen. Now I realize not all of these can be implemented for every campaign, and these are merely the totals of Google ‘internal’ data. But still, if you aren’t already using these tactics, try to implement as many as possible and you should see your click-through rise significantly.

If you’re strapped for time, look at the best practices and ad extensions that statistically lead to higher CTRs and try them out first. You might also want to try these out one at a time rather than making all of these changes collectively to see how click-through rate, quality score, average CPC, spend, and conversions are impacted.

What ad copy best practices and ad extensions do you see the biggest improvement from?